Imagine going to the Louvre – you’re beyond ecstatic to see the Mona Lisa first hand after years of waiting and saving up, and it all culminates to that moment as you stand patiently at the queue that has built up to a threshold of the museum. Upon arriving at the arches of the entrance you find that you must pay 270 dirhams but this does not matter as it’s worth it; the turmoil of a long haul did not lead up to be set back by such a price.
So you pay the amount and you walk in, you’re led down the corridors and your excitement is bubbling at the rim. You’re brought to stand in front of a big black sheet covering a square frame with an overhead bulb lighting the nuances of the sheet. The curator looks at you gleefully and says, “Are you ready to witness the grandeur of the Mona Lisa?” As a tremble breaks your voice you reply back in the affirmative. And in one swoop, he pulls down the sheet and you stand dumbfounded. Your bafflement is not out of amazement for the Mona Lisa but rather for the fact that you seem to be shown the forehead of the Mona Lisa….only the forehead.
You look back at the curator and ask, “what is this atrocity”, to which the curator replies “This is the Mona Lisa! Well, only a part of it – if you would like to see the remainder of the face, you will have to wait one more month and pay an extra of 80 dirhams. Let it be known that 80 dirhams will only buy the eyes, nose and lips. If you want to see the chin and cheeks, you will need to buy the special ticket through Amazon for about 120 dirhams. However, if you’re willing to wait a year we will be selling tickets for the exhibition – PAINTING OF THE CENTURY – and that you can buy for the half price and you get to witness the Mona Lisa in its complete glory” You look back with a blank stare and jaw dropped. The curator adds, “By the way, for the low price of 15 dirhams we will change the color of the frame from sunset gold to cherry red.”
That, my fellow readers, is what it feels like to be a gamer in 2015.
Times have changed – the tide of video game design is shifting from making holistic games that showcase immersive gameplay and poignant stories to that of being highly marketable. The internet, as of late, has shown uproar with many AAA companies not selling the games they promised to sell, a fine example being the infamous train wreck known as Destiny. Yet, juxtapose to that would be Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. No, Witcher 3 did not make consumers pay full price for quarter of a game and then subsequently make them pay extra for the remaining bits of the story through DLCs and expansion packs, rather it did the very opposite – it gave the players a complete game (almost 200 hours worth) along with free DLCs and only the expansions packs had to be paid for.
CD Projekt Red showed the world that game developers still care about the quality of the game and in turn care about how that game affects the experience of the consumers; more recently would be MGS: Phantom Pain, keeping aside all the studio’s internal conflicts, the game was a superb for old fans and newcomers to the series. Sadly, over the years many great developers and franchises have fallen to avarice – prime examples being Bungie and assassins creed respectively. And to an extent the gaming world has lost its rays of hope and consequently turned towards indie games to satiate the hunger for comprehensive video games. One would think that AAA companies and top tier studios would have learned something from the ‘horse armor’ debacle created by Bethesda, but instead they still keep pushing low-quality games and their superfluous add-ons into the consumers face.
Ubisoft is a repeated offender of the aforementioned statement, and gamers everywhere know that all too well because of the one trick donkey they seem to publish every year – ‘Assassins creed’. Ubisoft’s true colors showed when on the release date for ‘Assassins creed: unity’, the game had been plagued with bugs and glitches, which were funny at first but then it’s novelty ran out when they became commonplace. Franchises such A.C. used to mean something, they were what you looked forward to every E3! But now the developers partake in the practice of flagrantly pushing out each installment as soon as possible with as little innovation and even lesser polish, to the point that it’s sort of becoming a running joke; a joke with no punchline.
I’m going to put this right out there – downloadable content, nowadays, is rubbish. Don’t get this article wrong, it is not a piece of ‘anti-DLC’ propaganda but rather one that shuns the idea of paying for those DLCs that make such a minimal difference to a game that you could probably find more gripping content in a blank flip book. If we consider a video game as a jigsaw puzzle, DLCs should not be half the pieces in that jigsaw! Downloadable content is meant to complement a game, not complete the original content; Dovetail studios missed the memo on that when they decided to release almost $3,000 worth of DLC on Steam few days ago, Yes you read that right. There are some DLCs out there that add-on to the main story arc or complete some slightly open-ended questions, but that’s all they do – clarify or rectify small doubts and curiosities, not substitute whole parts of an arc.
Now many of you may state that most DLCs are not badly priced for what you get, a prime example being paying 2 dollars for a skin. Well, the issue is that when large groups of people buy multiple skin packs, it amounts to a large gain for the publisher, you may have only spent a total of 6 dollars for those 3 skins in one shot but in the large scheme of it all – the developers and publishers made a truckload. This is a conundrum because they start to look at it as a way of making easy money for something as simple as a color change or texture change on an item, what happens then is that they start blocking out ingenuitive ideas of quality content and instead choose the easy path of churning out the same old skin pack concept over and over again. It’s a vicious cycle that’s under the guise under a really bright blue camo.
It’s not enough that gamers are bombarded with a tsunami of lackluster DLC, but now it seems as though studios can’t even seem to churn out a decent game – yes, I’m looking at you Arkham knight; what’s even more egregious is that a PC port fiasco and the collector’s edition debacle came about from a studio with high acclamations i.e. Rocksteady Studios. It seems as though studios spend so much time and money on marketing the product as a ‘whole’, when in reality the final product is nowhere even near to being 20% complete – perfect examples of this being Duke Nukem Forever and the more recent Aliens: Colonial Marines. These two games are stark reminders that dev diaries and gameplay footages can no longer be trusted because they are so augmented to make a video game seem more than it actually is, personally I’ve stopped looking at gameplay footages for the majority of games that came out in 2015.
This next paragraph will slightly touch upon a 5 syllable word that haunts every gamer at some point in their life, I’m referring to the nefarious and heavily used concept of ‘microtransactions’. It hurts me to say that even the recently acclaimed Metal gear Solid V fell to the allure of using such a ploy, as now gamers can purchase insurance for their base with real money. Real money. I fear at some point they’ll start rolling out in-game banks and firms with hopes of asking you to invest in hedge funds and stocks with real money, of course. Oh, and also they recently released horse armor for the purchase of $0.99.
A part of us wants to believe this is meant as a jab at Bethesda, but instinctively we all know someone in their office thought this was a great idea for DLC, and everyone around that person applauded out of sheer excitement. Microtransactions have always been around, they are something gamers and non-gamers know about too well, mainly due to the fact that this practice is heavily deployed within mobile gaming and MMORPGS. It’s a way for the developers to keep the money rolling while their product is still alive in the market. Thus, we see wonderful product ideas such as clothing accessories, item color changes, online fake-currency, easier ways to level up and character reconstruction packages with minimal creativity. Most of the time, these items tend to be priced quite low ($3 or so) but what this does is that it creates a system of habitual buying because you keep seeing them at such a low price, it doesn’t really occur to you that you bought 8 times at the price of $3 each, but in reality you’ve spent about $24 in one shot! This affixed with the way most of these games create a culture of constantly being up-to-date with the latest trends happening within their game world, this starts to create an addiction to microtransactions. So, this is where we’ve come – from being addicted to video games to being addicted to microtransactions.
There is a final trick that every publisher resorts to because why not? That dubious trick, my fellow readers, is known as pre-ordering. Square Enix recently committed to that heinous act with their ‘tiered pre-order structure’, to summarize it – the pre-order content is actually decided by the consumers. Now this all sounds great, but what happens is at each tier (with a total of 4 tiers) consumers vote between two options to feature into the pre-order bonus. However, if horror movies have taught us one thing it is that when making a deal with the devil, there is always a catch. In this scenario, it is that each tier only opens up depending on the number of people that have signed up for pre-orders. So, you could end up paying full price for the pre-order but if enough people didn’t sign up for it, you could only end up getting 2 tiers or even just 1 tier for that matter! If this doesn’t scream ‘MONEY HUNGRY’ then I don’t know what does.
You see, pre-ordering at one point made sense because it was always about ensuring a copy for yourself but with the onset of digital copies, there really isn’t a fear for missing out. Yet, many publishers corrupt this technique by putting out multiple versions of pre-orders, all with something that the other one doesn’t have, this in turn baits the consumer into buying multiple versions of the same game in order to experience different aspects of the game; a terribly recent reminder of this was EVOLVE. I mentioned earlier about studios releasing unpolished games, that coupled with pre-orders can be disastrous for consumers. Normally, one could wait for reviews before purchasing the game but with pre-orders the consumer is already tied to a product into which they have put their blind faith. At times, this ends tragically – again in the case of those who pre-ordered the PC version of Arkham knight, and in more recent times – for those who pre-ordered the PC version of Black Ops III.
Video games, in my eyes, will always be a form of art; visually and audibly animated forms of art. A good piece of artwork should be able to take the beholder into a dimension of new possibilities – be it visually, audibly or something tangible, good art should be able to transport the viewer to an entirely new atmosphere that is woven together by their imagination. To me, video games do this the best because they have the ability to put the player in control of the main character, and this in turn adds a certain level of relatability to the story, development, decisions, NPCs and the environment. Now, in terms of painting, there are two types of artists – there are those who bleed and sweat for their work, with every ounce of their strength they pour their heart and soul in their project so that the world can revel in it, be inspired by it and be moved by it, and then there are those artists that paint a canvas black and try to sell it for 10 million. So, in the gaming world there are studios that stand on either side of that line, and sometimes they cross sides.
To those studios that align themselves with the former – I, along with the gaming community, applaud and thank all of you for your hard work and commitment. To those that side with the latter – I say to all of you that you are nothing more than conmen, making a mockery of a timeless art form.
One day, your cheap tricks and gimmicky marketing techniques will collapse on itself, and you will be forced to finally make use of the ‘creative team’ that you’ve tied up and left for dead in the pantry.
I am grateful for the surge in indie game development, this is what gaming needs right now – a lesson in its roots. Indie games deliver both quality content as well as a holistic experience, they’re even changing the way gamers experience gameplay and narrative as some of the best-known indie games take the less-beaten path to game immersion.
So, till game developers and studios collectively look at video games as a form of art and not as a dollar sign, we’ll keep a shilling out for half-baked content and frivolous add-ons because who in their right mind could turn down paying 5 dollars for a weapon pack that boasts improved fire rate and range, as we mentally block the realization that it’s just a re-skin of a set of weapons 2 installments back; Oh, glorious denial.
